Ken Severs

It’s the end of March already, which means that fifty years ago, I was approaching the end of the second term of my second year. I haven’t said much about that yet, but I will shortly. In the meantime, I wanted to say a little about Ken Severs, about whom I wrote previously here. Since then, I have learned more about him, largely due to a conversation with his son Adam, who very kindly sent me a copy of his father’s book, A Place of Being, which I believe was the only full-length poetry collection that Ken Severs published, and even then posthumously. But the acknowledgements make plain something that I don’t think many of us were aware of at the time: that many of these poems had appeared in prestigious journals such as The Listener, The Spectator, The New Statesman and elsewhere. Ken was, as I mentioned previously, a leading light of the lively Leeds poetry scene, and encouraged students to submit to the in-house university publication Poetry and Audience, in which the work of really well-established poets was juxtaposed with that of undergraduates.

Adam, who had a long career in broadcasting himself as a sound engineer, gave me some more detail about his father’s life. Ken suffered from a broken back aged thirteen, and this caused him suffering for the rest of his life. After teaching in Cairo and Jerusalem after the war, he became a major figure in the arts scene in Leeds, after his BBC appointment, as announced here in the Yorkshire Post in 1954:

I would love to know what the job of “censor” at Durham University involved! By 1968, he was set for an important BBC post in Birmingham, after the corporation reorganised its regional bases, and decided to develop the Pebble Mill site in Edgbaston. He decided to remain in Leeds, and was appointed to a senior lectureship in the English department. My memory of him was as I recounted in the previous post. He died of a heart attack in February 1975, in my second year. To my shame, I don’t remember knowing about it, or coming across any announcement then. There must have been something, but as he was not either a tutor of a lecturer on any of my courses, I must have missed it.

 

Reading the poems, I find the work of a very accomplished poet on every page. What strikes me is that there doesn’t seem to be a consistent voice or tone, and perhaps that’s inevitable in a book of collected poems. The subject matter ranges from landscapes of the north of England to the Apollo space ship, to the reliquaries of ancient churches. The treatment varies too: some brief, lyrical pieces drawn, one imagines from personal experience, and some ambitious longer works, some set out in dialogue form. I can discern the shade of other poets in some of these pieces. Louis MacNeice is one such, and the poem “A Deadly Affair” is dedicated in his memory. Geoffrey Hill, a colleague at Leeds, of whom more in a future post, may have influenced poems such as “Evidence before a Prince Bishop of Durham (c.1400)” with its dark first person account of a violent sexual assault. Add to this some poems reminiscent of W.H. Auden, and some of T.S. Eliot, and you may think that Severs was not terribly original. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, there are clearly influences, but in these wide-ranging pieces, there are some startlingly different poems, in which both public and personal topics are examined in a fresh and engaging way. For instance, drawing obviously on his long career in the BBC, his poem “Broadcasting” seems just as relevant now as it did fifty years ago:

 

Kenneth Severs was an important figure for me, albeit only briefly. His breadth of knowledge and reference, and his rigour, were admirable qualities in anyone seeking to engage young minds in some of the most difficult English poetry. His lectures on the metaphysicals were real eye-openers, and stood me in very good stead in my teaching career. I have been engrossed in his poems, which bear repeated readings, each time revealing more depth of feeling. I shall return to his work again in future, but until then, I raise a glass to his memory.  RIP, sir.

 

Ken Severs by Dr Rob Spence is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.